Anyone who knows us folks at LBC really well knows that we have an affinity for our toys. Personally, I’m a madman for a good upgrade; going back to my early days as a coder and tech writer, I can’t resist filling my spare time with the neverending, quixotic chase after better ways of doing more for less cost. Every step forward in simplifying, extending and flattening our tech infrastructure means being able to deliver better service on a more versatile basis. Ultimately, it means cutting overhead and energizing growth. We love it.
The part of the process that I still find amazing is how many business processes today are still mired in 1980s paradigms. Analog phone lines. Fax machines. Snail mail. Standalone word processors, spreadsheets and other office tools. They’re the tech holdouts, where you risk committing heresy by daring to discard them.
Today, we began the process of winding down our support for fax traffic. Several years ago we traded in our fax machine for EFax, an Internet-based fax service. Reviewing our costs recently, we had to seriously ask: how many faxes have we really been sending and receiving? More and more, what would have been faxed just two years ago is now increasingly being done with email and a scanner. How often are we using this thing?
Turns out, seven times in two years. We’d been keeping it around because, well, people expect you to be able to receive faxes – right? You can’t NOT have a fax number. Except that the numbers say that we’re barely using it at all. So we’re shifting to a much less expensive service that has better mobility and cloud integration. Eventually we’ll drop kick it altogether and tell people to just email us.
Other heresies in the making, here at LBC offices:
Skype Premium. Coming into the new year, one of our major 2012 priorities was to mobilize our operations as much as was practical, allowing us to continue providing high quality service regardless of where our staff happened to be physically located. Skype Premium has allowed us to achieve much of that goal. At a per-account price of $60/year, we have rock solid voice telephony and unlimited North American from any good wireless service spot.
Google Drive. We’ve been fans of Google Docs for a while. Many of our core spreadsheets and documents are now stored in the cloud, and Google’s word processor and spreadsheet applications are more than adequate alternatives to MS Word or OpenOffice for us. While Microsoft Word may be on 1980’s Tech Death Row, we haven’t been able to untether ourselves from Office quite yet.. but we see the day coming.
Carbonite. It was simply time for a better office backup system, and Carbonite is it. As a side effect, secure web-based availability of backups also means that when we’re out of the office and need an important file, we can often grab it from Carbonite backups.
Evernote for CRM. CRM has been a thorn in our side for a long time, and we’ve spent much of the last two years searching for a solution that worked well for us. The problem is, most CRM packages out there are trying to recreate ACT – and ACT wasn’t all that awesome to begin with. We don’t need the convoluted complexity of a major corporate CRM platform. At the same time, we need more than is offered by the many cloud-based CRM services that are designed primarily for very small shops. We also need a clean, intuitive UI with robust mobility support backed by a solid, reliable provider.
We’re finding that Evernote can be quickly and effectively adapted to do the job, particularly leveraged with Google Contacts as a contact manager. UI quality is strong, and the integration options are exceptional. Combined with Android’s ability to efficiently associate contact traffic from Gmail, Linkedin, Facebook and any number of other online sources, Evernote seems to have provided the missing piece for our CRM needs right now.
What tools are your business using to streamline and flatten your operations? Drop me an email and let us know. We’d love to hear them!
